


the lion sleeps tonight

by perennials



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: F/F, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 00:40:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19712800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: “You know, if you want to kiss her then you should just fucking kiss her. In my opinion.”“Your opinion drove you and Kise to opposite ends of the globe, and it took a holy intervention from god himself to get the two of you back together.”Daiki flips her off again.





	the lion sleeps tonight

**Author's Note:**

> cw for implied sexual content, smoking, and copious amounts of existentialism

_hush my darling, don't fear my darling_

_the lion sleeps tonight_

Today is a Bad Bra Day, because she’s wearing the wrong bra. It’s several sizes too small and keeps riding up around her torso, so that she feels like she’s constantly on the verge of being suffocated or just having her bra flipped inside-out under her shirt like some idiot who can’t get her shit together. Her mother always told her to throw this one out, but she never got around to it; four years passed. In that time, she faithfully managed to put on the wrong bra at least twice annually, and each time its negative karma had spread a la the ripple effect in elementary school science, laying ruin to her entire life. She forgot to bring her only functional tube of lip gloss to school. Daiki lost a game. She forgot to bring her only functional tube of lip gloss to school and Daiki lost a game.

If possible, Satsuki would have preferred not to have to leave her apartment at all, but she’s sold her soul to Kise for the afternoon. “You’re really a masochist,” Daiki informs her, leaning out of his front door and looking unimpressed with her general existence.

“I am not. All of my other bras are in the laundry or still drying,” she replies. Daiki closes his door after that. He doesn’t get it; of course he doesn’t. Satsuki’s Bad Bra Days are a threat only to herself.

Later on the train, she checks her Oha Asa horoscope on her phone, because the Tanuki keychain she saw on someone’s bag had reminded her of Midorima and his unwavering faith in the chronological continuity of the universe. Satsuki does not believe in horoscopes. They’re cryptic and badly-phrased and don’t tell you anything. _Someone from your past will re-enter your life._ See? That didn’t tell her anything. She’s still going to sell Kise her soul for the afternoon and he’s going to tell her too many unnecessary details about the state of his relationship with Daiki. If she’s lucky, he’ll be smiling. If she’s unlucky, which she is, as today is a Bad Bra Day, then he’ll be smiling his Kise Ryouta Is A Piece Of Shit smile and she’ll have to deal with that, too, between the gratuitous shopping and the family restaurant parfaits. This is something she is prepared to deal with.

What Satsuki is not, however, prepared to deal with, is the person who slides into the seat beside her at the next station.

Aida Riko is wearing a diamond pendant on a silver chain around her neck. It looks expensive and well-cared for in a way that makes Satsuki wonder if it was gifted to her by someone important. A close friend, maybe, or a lover.

“Excuse me, is there something on my face?” Aida asks, looking at Satsuki suddenly. “Oh. Never mind.” Recognition registers on her face like a curtain call, and the polite edge vanishes. Her gaze is steady and far from accusatory, and it forces Satsuki to actually look at her instead of just concentrating really hard on her accessories.

Satsuki recalls three years of vibrant, pent-up hell. She smiles, and hopes Aida can’t tell it’s a Kise Ryouta Is A Piece Of Shit smile.

“There’s nothing on your face. Actually, do you mind if I—”

  


::

  


She doesn’t ask Aida if she can touch her face, although the sentiment lingers boldly in her mouth like a particularly pungent brand of toothpaste for the next three hours. Instead, she has a five minute long spiritual experience in which they make small talk— how’s your job as a physiotherapist, it’s all right; where are you going, Shinjuku; do you still keep in touch with your high school team, yes-no, no-yes. The train shivers as it crawls through the bright, medicated city of Tokyo.

Luckily their carriage isn’t very crowded, although the occasional stranger does step on her feet, and she takes care to return each one a sharp jab in the ankle. Aida’s wearing a casual dress, striped in black and gray with a high neckline that complements her heart-shaped face. She’s grown her hair out, just past her shoulders, and she twirls a strand between her thumb and forefinger as she talks.

After a while Satsuki realizes that she’s the only one that’s been asking questions. Then it dawns on her that she’s missed her station, so she definitely has to get off now or Kise will have her soul for the rest of eternity, but she gives Aida her number first. Just in case. Of what? Of anything. Momoi Satsuki is always one for chances. It’s how she managed to get so far in life before she fell off the merry-go-round of destiny, after all.

  
So she gives Aida her number. The mental image of Aida Riko smiling at her blandly and waving her goodbye should not be as jarring as it is, but it stays with Satsuki until she exits the train station. She won’t say she’s mesmerized. She probably isn’t.

  


::

  


Today is a Bad Bra Day, so naturally, she’s late to her appointment with Kise. Satsuki tells him it’s a Bad Bra Day in the hopes that some of her bad karma will rub off on him, but he just brushes it off and smiles a smile that isn’t the Kise Ryouta Is A Piece Of Shit smile. Good for him, she thinks, and makes a mental note to buy something back for Daiki. Socks, maybe; he’s been wearing all of his through, even the pairs from Touou and his college days.

Kise drags her through Shibuya like an overenthusiastic tour guide from a collapsing tour agency saddled with debt. Satsuki lets him, because they don’t see each other very often these days and this is how Kise tells people that he cares about them— by buying them things with his bottomless credit card, and smiling, and getting hurt for them. They’re still working on the last point, Daiki inclusive.

Some time after their second family restaurant parfait, Satsuki gets distracted by the mental image of Aida smiling blandly at her on the train and waving goodbye, which hasn’t left her head for some reason, and loses Kise. This is fairly uncharacteristic of Satsuki— Kise is the one who usually loses _her._ When she comes back to her senses, she’s standing in front of a body-length mirror in a shop on the seventh floor, staring at her own reflection. The young-looking sales assistant is watching her with concern from behind a rack of frilly tops. Satsuki feels a bit bad, somehow, so she buys a pair of tights and then leaves.

  


::

  


Momoi Satsuki was something of an icon in high school. Simultaneously juggling her managerial position in their highly-successful basketball team with her dazzling personality and looks, she was well aware that she turned heads everywhere she went, and worked just a little harder so that the stubborn ones would not be able to resist doing so as well. Back then, she had not yet acquired any wrongly-sized bras.

Even amongst her peers, Aida Riko stood out. She was in a similar position to Satsuki’s, albeit while significantly less well-endowed. Only Aida’s role was heavier than hers, and therefore harder, and probably kept her up much later into the night than Satsuki. Satsuki admired that strength. It took iron to raise a team like that to the heavens.

They spoke a few times. Before games, whenever she came over on the premise of visiting Kuroko, at the hot springs in their freshman year. Aida was standoffish and beautiful and responded to all of Satsuki’s provocations with a sharpness that made her fifteen year-old heart shiver. She enjoyed it as much as she resented how Aida had taken one of her miracles from under her wing and turned him human. Maybe Satsuki wanted to be human as well. This was a line of thought that stayed with her constantly, but she refused to explore; Satsuki was an icon, and icons did not dream of electric sheep. Not like that.

Without her realizing it, the innocent desire to be friends eloped with an ugly, bull-faced lover and then returned several centuries later as something completely unrecognizable. Still, she ignored the cancerous thing in her chest. High school flew by, as all things do in retrospect, the days toppling into each other until they were as tall as skyscrapers; Kuroko continued his path of destruction and reconstruction, summer bled into fall, winter blossomed into spring. She watched as Daiki grew outwards like a plant, reaching towards the tenuous beam of light that became of Kise Ryouta without ever quite reaching him.

By the time Satsuki realized that she was in love with Aida, they had graduated. She had not remembered to ask for her number throughout the three years they had known each other, and for what it was worth, Aida did not initiate any contact, either. She left for Nagoya while Satsuki was lying on her bedroom carpet, drawing patterns in the ceiling with her finger.

  


::

  


She finds a pair of socks at the three hundred yen store two streets down— black with a tiny pineapple print, except half of the pineapples are wearing sunglasses and the other half are staring enviously at the ones wearing sunglasses. A minute later, she finds Kise, too, walking past a cafe with two crepes in his hands. He gives her one of them, sakura-pink and stuffed with pitted cherries.

“Not to use you as a springboard for voicing my insecurities or anything,” she says as they lean against a wall in a quieter side street, peeling the paper wrapping away from her crepe with manicured fingers. “But let’s say you meet someone you had feelings for in high school after seven years, and you’re not sure if you still have feelings for them. Also, they’ve grown their hair out.”

She’s not really sure where she was going with that sentence, so she can’t finish it. Kise stares at her pensively. His eyes are sad and knowing, and isn’t it funny how they have fallen out of their roles over the years, how he’s stopped being Ki-chan and she doesn’t have the answer to every question in the world anymore. Once upon a time, Momoi Satsuki was an icon.

“The fact that you’re unsure means there’s probably still something there, don’t you think?” Kise finally says, and this is not accusatory, either. He is only giving her the raw data so she can beat the truth out of it herself. Shibuya glitters around them, an evening laced with alcohol and asterisms. Satsuki’s phone vibrates with a text from Daiki.

_daiki [18:49]: i can’t believe you were right. i’m out of socks again_

  


::

  


Satsuki liked Kuroko because he, more than anyone else on the team, resembled her. They all had issues, as overachieving middle school geniuses are wont to have, but where Akashi was always three light-years ahead of everyone and Daiki was stuck in the past, Kuroko merely stood in place and stared. Quiet and missable and surrounded by enthralling, larger-than-life teenage boys (who he enthralled in turn, though he was not quite aware of it at the time), Kuroko saw what the world swallowed in its sleep. This fascinated Satsuki, who was used to being the one doing all the digging with a shovel, alone.

So when Kuroko vanished from the Teikou basketball team and then reappeared a year later with a new set of faces, she could only bring the past back onto the plate, point at it with her butter knife, and say _look what you did, once._ She was not bitter, just sad in the way parents are when their children grow up and go to college in another city.

Then Aida appeared, and the rest was history.

  


::

  


_Aida [00:03]: Wednesday afternoon. Are you free?_

_Satsuki [00:03]: yes._

Someone from your past will re-enter your life.

_Be careful._

  


::

  


Momoi Satsuki probably wants to be loved. Unfortunately, she also wants to shave bald, quit her grayscale office job and move to Aomori so she can eat apples until she dies, and throw away all of her old bras. She can no longer tell which ones are rational and justified, and which are daydreams.

In the plush, sofa-cushioned booth at the back of a small coffee shop in Shin-Urayasu, she wonders if maybe she has daydreamed Aida into existence, too.

“Kagami-kun recommended this place to me. Apparently their burnt cheesecake is good,” she’s saying, one hand curled around the side of her face. Her hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail that looks like it could be undone in one motion; her eyes are bright. For all the color in her face, twenty five must have fallen in love with her.

Satsuki tells her cheesecake is one of her favorites, even though she doesn’t really play favorites anymore and frankly hasn’t had any since the high school basketball coach with the oversized v-necked sweater and black clips in her hair, and they make small talk through the hour. Aida stays flighty, but even she begins to relax, if only a little. She begins to gesture as she speaks, hands doing elaborate pirouettes through the air as she tells Satsuki about Kuroko and Kagami and her patients, the Aida-shaped space she’s made for herself in the universe. Maybe Satsuki was wrong about one thing— small talk is not meant only for strangers. Today small talk means Aida’s willing to open her front door at least half of the way. It means she’s sitting in this cafe on a Wednesday afternoon with Satsuki, long legs crossed under the table, sipping from a tall glass of lemonade. And if they’re sharing a slice of burnt cheesecake then Satsuki cannot say a thing, because this is far, far more than she had been expecting from that encounter on the train.

When Aida laughs, her eyes crinkle at the corners. Satsuki burns like a city on fire with all the things she cannot say.

  


::

  


“You may be even clingier than I am,” Kise tells her a few days later, delighted.

“Thank you, I had no idea.”

  
  
“I mean— _I_ certainly didn’t know. Does Daiki know? I’m going to tell him. Right now.”

“He won’t believe you.”

“He will. I’m telling him.”

  


::

  


It turns out Wednesday afternoons are Aida’s weekly socializing hours. Satsuki finds out about this on the third time they see each other, now at a different coffee shop, still recommended by Kagami. Immediately, she worries that she’s imposed for far too long on Aida, and says so, but Aida only smiles quietly and shrugs, saying she doesn’t really have anyone else she wants to meet, anyway. The implication is weak as a promise and barely-present, but Satsuki’s heart drags itself across the concrete to point at it while bleeding profusely, claiming something like hope.

She’s never been good at give-and-take, and has always circumvented the problem by choosing not to give anything of herself away at all. Up until now, this had worked just fine. But that had been in a world without Aida. Aida is cruel in an almost childish way. She reveals herself in bits and pieces— the skin on the inside of her wrist, the tan-lines on her shoulders, her history of failed relationships— and asks nothing, but the look in her eyes oscillates from mild amusement to disinterest, and Satsuki has to kick hard to keep her head above the water. When Aida’s gaze drifts brazenly to the old grandfather clock in the opposite corner of the room, Satsuki is forced to employ emergency measures. She had wanted, originally, to become a lawyer. She cheated her way through a series of tests in her second year of college by writing small bits of information in morse code on her nails. There was a cockatiel once, small and slight and handsome, but she had forgotten to latch its cage door and it had flown away. It never came back.

“Why did you cut your hair?” Aida asks her months later, leaning across the table with her own hair brown and glossy, falling over her face.

Satsuki reaches out and brushes a lock of hair behind Aida’s ear, her fingers barely skimming the skin of her lobe. Aida goes statue-still.

“I felt like some part of myself had gone away, so I wanted to let it know it didn’t have to come back.”

Sometimes you only realize that you have drawn lines for yourself in the sand after you have crossed them and left dust in your wake. Satsuki doesn’t do much thinking these days, and well— it shows. Aida’s already spreading her wings, looking skyward, getting ready to run.

  


::

  


“You know,” Daiki calls from his side of the world. His balcony is technically the same size as Satsuki’s, but he keeps a hellfire assortment of zombie plants in little pots that Kise decorated with permanent marker last year, and still has not, at twenty four, learned how to secure clothes to a clothesline properly.

“I don’t know, you’ll have to tell me,” Satsuki tells him cheerily and with great haste, interrupting his train of thought. He flips her off.

_“You know,_ if you want to kiss her then you should just fucking kiss her. In my opinion.”

“Your opinion drove you and Kise to opposite ends of the globe, and it took a holy intervention from god himself to get the two of you back together.” By holy intervention, she means tracking down Kise’s five-star hotel room in Argentina, getting seats on a sold-out flight, and somehow not losing both of them to alcohol poisoning within twelve hours of Daiki touching down at the international airport terminal. Akashi is just god.

Daiki flips her off again. Daiki will forever aspire to take a piss on the sun, and when he finally succeeds at doing so he will take a selfie with its pissed-on remains and broadcast it to the whole world, after which Kise will arrive on a five star spaceship to make him eat shit and then kiss him. It’s one of the things that’s kept them together for all these years. The other must be fate.

“I’m just saying.”

“I know.”

She does, in fact, know. Momoi Satsuki has collected more sheer human data than most supercomputers in existence, and probably knows far too much about her own vices for it. At the turning point of her twenties, she came to the realization that no matter how many scenarios she calculated for or how many factors she controlled, everything would end in the same way. Someone always fucks up. It’s just a matter of who that someone is, and who has to take the blow.

And yet knowing is not the same as having answers, which is why no matter how much her summer-addled brain screams at her to _just fucking kiss her already, you’re going to eat the glass she drinks lemonade out of at this rate,_ she can’t bring herself to do it. Self-awareness is not the first step towards change— it is merely a revolution. A three hundred and sixty-degree survey of the world that returns you to the same place you started from, so self-awareness is really only a revelation. Whether one chooses to do something with that revelation is another matter entirely.

  


::

  


After high school, Kuroko went to college and studied classical literature. By the time he finally emerged from his hole in the ground several years later, he had become an editor under a renowned publishing company, smoked three cigarettes a day, and had dragged Akashi down from the heavens and coerced him into planning world domination out of his shoebox apartment in Jimbocho. Most of this information had been passed down the line to her from various ex-teammates, but she doesn’t find out about the cigarettes until she bumps into him at Kinokuniya one evening.

“Excuse me, I am looking for an english novel about a boy who goes on a journey, overcomes a lot of obstacles, and finally reaches his goal, only it’s not the same thing he set out to find—” Kuroko stares at her blankly. She’s not sure if it’s because he had really mistaken her for an employee, or if it’s simply been too long since they last met.

“I think a lot of stories fit your bill,” she tells him.

“That is true,” he says. His voice is rougher now, like he hasn’t been getting enough sleep or water. Under the warm ceiling lights, he looks paler than ever, like he might just topple backwards into a shelf and vanish. He probably could.

Kuroko thinks about it for a while, then wanders off to another section. Satsuki follows him; she hadn’t really walked in with a specific goal in mind anyway, and she’s curious to see what novel he’s talking about. She watches as he catches the attention of a man in the middle of restocking a shelf, repeats the explanation, disappears for a few minutes, and then returns with a slim volume tucked under his arm.

“What kind of novel is it?”

“A simple one, with a happy ending.”

“Is it realistic?”

“It is as realistic as you want it to be.”

They walk out of the heavy glass doors together, and Kuroko holds it open for her after him. It’s getting dark now, street lamps flickering to life around them as he pulls a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. He lights one up.

“Don’t say ‘I didn’t know you smoked’,” he murmurs, exchanging eye contact briefly, and Satsuki smiles despite herself. There’s a little kitchen fire in his eyes after all. She doesn’t really have much to say to him, not these days, but his presence still carries that same reassuring weight it always has. It is an honor to be acquainted with Kuroko Tetsuya. He haunts all of them in little ways, even if he doesn’t reply to texts ninety-nine percent of the time and shows his face at reunions once in several blue moons. It’s how he is, transparent and unassuming, and kind.

“Just don’t die too young. Daiki would be sad.” She counts daydreams as they pass them by, wrapped in wool coats and thick down jackets, dripping with gemstones.

“Of course. Don’t you believe in miracles?”

  


::

  


A few days after that, she gets a rare text from Kuroko. _Aida-san spoke about you frequently at Seirin. She sounded annoyed, but I personally believe it was something more than that._

Satsuki responds immediately: _???????????_ But the next time he messages is months later when he decides to hold a baby shower for No. 2’s litter of puppies, and mass-texts all of their friends.

  


::

  


On a cold, feverish night at the end of winter, Aida calls.

It’s half past eleven. Satsuki is trying to fold a batch of clothes that she has put off for a week when her phone rings, but she drops the wrinkled shirt she’s holding in a heartbeat and picks up. Aida’s voice is silvery and distant, like it’s coming from the other end of a long, dim tunnel. There’s a note of panic underneath all that indifference, and it frays Satsuki’s nerves right down to the bone.

“Can you come over,” Aida finally asks, and Satsuki is suddenly so fucking grateful that she rejected her parents’ offer to bring over their old sound system. She could have missed those words, and then what would have become of Momoi Satsuki? She would never have been able to face Kuroko ever again.

“Yes, _yes._ I have no idea where you live.”

“I’ll text you.”

Satsuki’s shadow chases her through the slowly turning twilight, backpack jostling on her shoulders as she follows the route marked out on her too-bright phone screen. When she finally makes it to Aida’s front door, it’s past midnight. She rings the doorbell. Seconds pass, there’s the sound of a chain sliding in its slot, and then the door cracks open.

“Hi,” Satsuki manages. Aida closes her fingers around her wrist and pulls her inside.

  


::

  


Aida Riko wants to be loved. In turn, she has tried to love others, beautiful girls draped in gold and ivory, classmates and teammates and colleagues, and yet each time someone fell off the merry-go-round of happy endings. Aida has been searching for peace for a long, long time.

“I didn’t know who else to call,” she says, a touch bitter, when Satsuki asks. She sits on the gray sofa in her living room with her knees pressed together, staring fiercely into her lap. Satsuki is pouring boiling water into two cups of instant ramen in the kitchen. “Winter is my least favorite time of the year. It gets cold so easily.

“This has nothing to do with you, to be honest, I just— needed to hear someone’s voice, you know. After you graduate everyone goes on to do their own separate things, and work’s busy for all of us, but I wish I had tried harder to hold on to what I had when it was still within arm’s reach. These days I get tired so fucking easily. Nothing stays.”

She puts her cup ramen on the table. Turns to Satsuki.

“And then _you_ appear, and you look _good,_ but all you want to do is sit in every coffee shop in Tokyo and talk about the past, so what the fuck am I supposed to do? You never tried to find me in those seven years, and neither did I.” They walk forward while facing backwards, falling into the future with their hands tied behind their backs. Satsuki’s never believed in horoscopes. “Look at us. We’ve become boring.” Every word comes out like a spot of flame, burning up in the cold, cold air between them. Aida Riko has never been dramatic. She is one of the strongest people Satsuki knew in high school. She led her haphazard team of angry teenage boys straight up to the heavens.

But Aida is not an icon, either. For the first time since that day on the train, Satsuki sees the unevenness of her bangs, the flaking nail polish, the redness around her eyes and nose, and realizes that she, too, has been unnecessarily cruel. For all the knowledge she has collected in her lifetime, Satsuki still does not have the answers to every question in the world. Kuroko realized this when she bumped into him at Kinokuniya. Daiki must have known all along.

Satsuki forces herself to breathe, and then lays her hands gently on Aida’s shoulders.

“I’m going to ask you three questions. Am I what you need?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I be?”

Aida looks away, lowering her eyes. Her skin is soft and warm beneath Satsuki’s palms, and the ends of her hair brush over Satsuki’s knuckles every time she turns her head.

“I want you to try.”

“Then, can I kiss you?”

Her last words are no more than a thin breath of air, but woven into them is the sound of every high school basketball match they fought, every stilted encounter in the girl’s bathroom, every time one of them looked across the gymnasium like a sailor lost at sea, and the other averted her eyes.

“Yes. Please.”

  


::

  


It was a cold, feverish night at the end of winter, and Aida looked sadder than the saddest person in the world. Somewhere inside of her, Satsuki recognized that she was being melodramatic, that she had work tomorrow, and that Aida Riko would likely not be going anywhere in the immediate future, but it had been seven years since she had let Aida walk out of her life while she lay on her bedroom carpet, hating herself with a violence, seven years of wandering in and out of bookstores looking for a happy ending— and frankly speaking, Satsuki was tired of letting things go.

Aida kissed with her eyes open; all Satsuki wanted to do was share a bit of her warmth with her. Right then, she could not think of any other way to do so.

  


::

  


The next day, Ryouta tries to break down Satsuki’s front door and gets alarmingly close to succeeding before Daiki appears in his boxers with his toothbrush sticking out of his mouth and tells him to knock it the fuck off. She’s not in her apartment; she went out; remember Seirin’s basketball coach. Yeah. They all do.

Ryouta wants to call her then because that’s how he shows that he cares (and he and Daiki are still working on it, in between the potted plants and the mismatched schedules and two a.m. sex), but Daiki tells him to stop being a nosy, overexcited teenager and leave them alone. Satsuki’s been pining after the same girl in the same battered daydream for the last seven years. God forbid he has to watch her fuck it up again.

It’s Ryouta’s turn to make breakfast today, so Daiki checks his phone while Ryouta scrambles eggs over a low fire. There’s a text from Tetsu about dogs and a baby shower of some sort.

“Hey, Ryouta, do you believe in miracles.”

“As much as I believe Akashi is god. Why?”

“Tetsu’s dog gave birth to a litter of puppies. Seven of them.”

Slowly, however slowly, all of them are starting to turn and face the light.

  


::

  


“Today’s a Bad Bra Day.”

It’s barely seven in the morning, the sun just beginning to crest the ragged city skyline outside. The curtains are drawn, the room is dark. Satsuki’s awake purely out of habit, and she’s not sure why she’s telling Aida any of this— she’s never bothered explaining the exact mechanics of her bad luck to anyone, having simply resigned herself to accepting whatever fucked up shit life threw at her. For every extra tube of lip gloss she bought, she only berated herself harder, biting her lip until it bled. She’s never been the sort to bandage her wounds.

“What does that mean.” Aida watches her from where she’s nearly swallowed up by blankets, her head propped up on her hand. Her eyes are puffy with sleep. Her shoulders are marked like the points on a treasure map; Satsuki’s never quite known how to play gentle. This morning she looks like she’s walked out of a storybook, and it doesn’t take Satsuki’s breath away, but it makes something in her chest ache with an age-old rhythm.

“It means I’ve worn the wrong bra, the one that’s a few sizes too small and makes me feel like I’m suffocating or like it’s going to flip up over my head and publicly humiliate me beyond salvation.” Satsuki makes to get off the bed, but Aida stretches across the sheets, lithe and catlike and pretty, and pulls her back down. “On Bad Bra Days, nothing goes right.” Aida kisses her temple. “I always end up regretting going out, and no matter how much information I have to help me I can’t get things to work properly.” The skin under her left eye. The tip of her nose. The corner of her mouth.

“Then don’t go. Give me your shitty bra. It’ll probably fit me better.”

“Oh,” Satsuki says, just as Aida presses a chaste kiss to her lips.

“I didn’t think of that.”

  


::

  


_“What kind of novel is it?”_

_“A simple one, with a happy ending.”_

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> this was one big ass experiment in butchering my writing style (which is usually a lot more Energetic), with inspiration taken from gusari's doujins and ao3 users inverse and gamblers. i had a lot of fun with it, so i hope you had fun reading it too. it definitely feels like i arrived to the kurobasu fandom approximately 5 years late, but i am here and ready to party with these wild ass power puff girls so hopefully this isn't my one and only entry in this tag lol
> 
> thank you for giving my work a chance! if you liked it feel free to kudo or comment or anything, i live especially for comments
> 
> take care, and have a good one


End file.
